Consequences of Social and Institutional Setups for Occurrence Reporting in Air Traffic Organizations

Deficient safety occurrence reporting by air traffic controllers is an important issue in many air traffic organizations. To understand the reasons for not reporting, practitioners formulated a number of hypotheses, which are difficult to verify manually. To perform automated, formally-based verification of the hypotheses an agent-based modeling and simulation approach is proposed in this paper. This approach allows modeling both institutional (prescriptive) aspects of the formal organization and social behavior of organizational actors. To our knowledge, agent-based organization modeling has not been attempted in air traffic previously. Using such an approach four hypotheses related to consequences of controller team composition in particular organizational contexts were examined.